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2024 – What Are Your Plans?

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on December 31, 2023| 1 Comment »

 In a few hours (here in the Pacific Northwest) it will be a new year. What are your Apocalypse plans?

We watched the Obama’s movie, “Leave the World Behind”. It stars Julia Roberts and is streaming on Netflix. It leaves you hanging at the end, which is very disappointing. What happens after New York City implodes? Do the families decide they can overcome race issues? Do they have the skills to survive in a new world? Why are they leaving us hanging?

I downloaded J.K. Franks’ Apocalypse series (there are four: three in the series and a stand-alone that ties into the others). Book #1 “Downward Cycle” is scary. The next three have a bit too much luck in the survival game, rather like “Zombieland” (with Woody Harrelson and highly recommended for the survivalist). No, wait: Franks’ books become almost as believable as John Cusack and his family out-running the earthquakes in L.A. and ending up in Yellowstone in the apocalypse movie “2012”.

I don’t want to give away any spoilers because I thoroughly enjoyed Franks’ books (and I recommend them to the next generation survivor), but sometimes help is a little too convenient.

Enter the current book I am reading “Post-Apocalyptic Nomadic Warriors” by Benjamin Wallace. It’s a farcical tale that draws a lot on the “Mad Max” movie series (starring Mel Gibson and Tina Turner).

Serious question: What are YOUR Apocalypse plans? Do you have any? What about Zombie apocalypse (less likely to happen because zombies are really a voodoo thing and don’t eat brains: they just haunt people who are cursed. People who are cursed by whoever raised the zombie from the dead, like some voodoo doctor).

Do you have a “bug-out bag”? What is in it? Do you have a place to land that is hidden, remote, and unlikely to be overrun by gangs of heathens when the world collapses? What about transportation in case of an EMP or a CME (Coronal Mass Ejection or solar flare)? Stockpiles of foods, preferable purchased from one of the many survivalist groups who advertise liberally on Facebook?

DO YOU HAVE A PLAN?

I used to have a plan in case of a Zombie Apocalypse: I would move in with my youngest. She disowned me sometime in the past six years, so I don’t really have that option. I do know you need a shovel, a machete, and a ladder: you can cut zombie’s head off and they lose all sense of smell and direction and you need the ladder to help you get onto the roof of your house because zombies can’t climb (until you watch “World War Z” and they just pile the bodies up until they can ascend to the top of the walls and fall over into the compound, ready to eat brains). I am woefully behind on zombie survival skills.

In the event of a CME or EMP, what are you gonna do? Banks won’t be able to dispense money. Money will be worthless. Food will be necessary, and clean water. Will you be able to trust the government? Will guns help you survive the threat of marauders and scavengers? What about ammo? Can you trust your neighbors? Can you drive a car with a standard transmission?

Can you trust the deer to warn you (as in the movie “Leave the World Behind”?)

How far away is your bug-out shelter? Is it really that remote that no one will think to look for you there? Or maybe you can hide under a silo like “Love and Monsters” where the hero travels above ground to find his high school sweetheart after the nuclear apocalypse? (Spoiler:Dylan O’Brien survives and befriends a dog).

For me, however, the biggest question is this: how old are you? What’s your health like? Are you on maintenance meds? Are you a member of a particular circle of people who might have enough survival skills to start a new society?

A friend of mine brought this up when we were camping this past summer: her genre happens to include people involved in Renaissance Faires. The Society of Creative Anachronism and other groups that aspire to the days of the past: black powder groups, rendezvous groups, and Ren Faire groups. Of course, they would have many of the skills to survive in a non-tech world. That’s what they have been play-acting at for the past few decades. The issue would be this: where do you fit into their structure?

I have herbal knowledge, although it is small. Edible plants and a few edible mushrooms. I have enough books to help guide us through any questions (but no way to transport my books). My husband is a hunter. My friend is a seamstress. Those are necessary skills, but they fall behind the basic skill of surviving marauding murderers and desperate scavengers. We’d have to rely on the swords-people and the black powder survivalists.

The truth is this: I am 67. I need certain medicines to survive longer than a few months. I can cook from scratch, drive a stick shift, handle a firearm, and hide in the woods. But the cold seeps into my bones and makes the joints ache. I have camped much of my life without potable water, ice, and a place to take a dump. I can sleep on the ground. But I am 67 years old.

The cars we own will be disabled. We might be able to rig up a radio. We have a store of food. Our children live far away. I’m an artist, a bird-watcher, and a gardener. My husband has heart issues. Were we younger, we could hike for miles and miles. But we’re not younger.

The reality is this: we would be a burden on society and the future. If mankind isn’t headed into a total extinction event, we would not be the people you would want to pin the future on. We would be the decoys.  

I have my post apocalypse plans. I won’t tell you what they are. But I really want to know what yours are? No need to tell me where you will bug-out to, just tell me what is in your survival arsenal? What advice would you give to those who survive (and are much younger than I am)? Do you have a shovel ready to swipe the head off of an attacking zombie?

These are important questions for 2024.

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It’s Been a Slow Start

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , on January 8, 2017| Leave a Comment »

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This is how I feel about 2017. I should be enthusiastically preparing new goals, tossing out old ones, and starting off on a good foot. I’m not.

I’m on the tail end of a nasty winter cold that kicked my butt and kept me out of the office a total of 13 hours last week. I’m coughing less and it hasn’t degraded into bronchitis, but I still lack energy and motivation. Today is the first day that I have done anything besides occupy space (I mean, aside from the daily living stuff we all do, like work, sleep, watch t.v., buy groceries and dog food, and watch it snow).

My brain is stuck somewhere on the long flight back from Georgia to Portland, just a week ago. We’d gone down to St. Augustine, Florida, on the Friday before: toured the old fort, wandered the “Colonial district”, drank beer at an Irish pub and a British pub, and spent the night in a motel. In the morning, we toured the lighthouse, and made the drive back to Georgia. My daughter-in-law took me to the airport in Savannah, and I began the long flight home. I didn’t sleep much.

Castillo de San Marcos

The Irish pub was in the Colonial district and our beer maid was a gal from Beaverton, Oregon. They had great micro-brews on tap.

The British pub was a karaoke dive where the bartender occasionally neglected his duties to sing. We bought bottled beer because what was on tap was so… normal. And we laughed and laughed and laughed. Then we went to a pizza place and split a shot of Jamesons’ whiskey to the Irish in all of us.

I made a lot of flight observations.

On the way out of Portland to DFW, I waited in the gate near a woman who was glued to her cell phone. You could hear her entire conversation. She never looked around, just talked into that damn phone the hour we sat at the gate waiting. And she followed me when we started to queue up to board, still talking on the damn phone. Worse, she was my seat mate, but by then she’d put down the phone and pulled out a lap-top that she remained glued to for the entire flight.

Me, I like to people watch. I observe. I listen. Little kids wandering away from parents. People plugging into their electronics and texting or reading. The way people avoid eye contact. People who make eye contact and manage a small smile. Anyone looking shifty. The woman who walks away from her luggage and returns a few minutes later. The number of dogs in the airport. The stewardesses and the gate crew. The clothes people wear.

I am the person who will see it coming: the guy with the gun or whatever. These people glued to their electronics? They’ll never see it coming. Can’t say if I’d survive, but I think I have a better chance than the clueless.

I checked my luggage through to Savannah because the flight was full. Carry-on, checked voluntarily = free checked bag. Remember that. I try not to check my luggage, but it felt right on Christmas eve.

Coming home, I met the only bigot on the entire trip. He really didn’t have any place to complain (he was “group 3”) but he was upset because a Ukraine ex-pat edged her way in front of him in line and he had to move to a slot behind me. I was in “group 2” with the woman from the Ukraine. But he still had to rant loudly that she should “go back to Russia. Go back to the Ukraine. Go back wherever she came from”.

I want to say that everyone turned to him and told him to shut up. I want to say that someone else stood up to him. I wanted to shut him out and ignore him, but he was in line right behind me, and still ranting. So I shut him up. “Really? Are we going to do that now?” Meaning: it’s New Year’s Eve, and we all want to go home. Just shut up and be patient.” Oh, and “You’re an asshole.” It shut him up.

Then I was on the airplane, next to a sullen-looking woman of about my age, and an empty middle seat. She slept; I stared out the window. New Year’s Eve turned to New Year’s Day somewhere along the flight, and I saw fireworks. But it was still 2016 when I landed and still 2016 when my girlfriend dropped me off at home.

Then it was 2017 and I was sick. And it was cold. And we had a snow/ice storm. And I am just simply not ready for it to be 2017. The year is more than a week old, and I am just catching up to the fact that the date changed. Oy vey.

Can I go back to Georgia now?

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